Kentucky Route Zero

This game moved me to tears in the most beautiful way- not from challenge or overcoming any tough sections or obstacles, but because of how the player interacts with the story.

It's an adventure game without puzzles - the game is oriented only around surreal visuals and a narrative that is driven by the player, as you play. What dialogue option is chosen then becomes the character's truth, creating an incredibly unique and tailored experience.

I connected with a lot of the characters in this game, but the sequencies with vocal music simply shook me everytime, often something I still think about and how I play games now.

This is one of my personal favorite games of all time. The creators, Cardboard Computer, worked on this game in an Act structure for nearly a decade. the experience of playing this game is other worldly to me, and contains a wonderfully dense, and beautifully dark and magically surreal narrative. This is less of a game that you "play" and more of one that you experience as an encounter. I know that sounds pretentious, but through a point-and-click interface this game treads the line between game and novel, through a medium that only video games can offer. I highly recommend this for people who are fans of southern gothic novels like those of Faulkner, O'Conner, and others. KR0 contains some of the most beautifully constructed and emotionally resonant moments I've ever experienced in a video game. At times KR0 feels like theatre performance, art installation, and lo-fi and low attended basement music show. There is something so alluring to this game that It's hard to explain the narrative without forcing meaning to those who have not played it. I highly encourage those that are looking for something more emotionally involved, thought-provoking and surreal to give this game a try.

[PL] Obywatel Kane z całym ciężarem tego porównania. Literacka perła o więziach w czasach kryzysu i hauntologiczne spojrzenie na peryferyjną Amerikanę. Meandruje.

This is a wonderful game that truly isn't for everyone. It isn't concerned with having to tell a large definitive beginning-and-end story. It would rather present scenes and characters and experiences that are interesting to read and watch. There isn't any handholding you to the point of the game, in fact there isn't really any one main point. But instead lots of little points that build an atmosphere and tell you stories that will hopefully stick with you. I loved this game. I don't know that I will ever play it again, but that's because it wouldn't really offer me anything. I have already experienced the characters and settings and stories. To do so again wouldn't change the experience I had with it.

Anyways, if you enjoy a slower paced story and enjoy a little bit more experimental storytelling, you might like Kentucky Route Zero. If you need your stories to have satisfying and explosive endings and twists, this might not be for you.

One of those games that people like to mention as their favorite so that they can feel smarter than anyone else. It’s great that there are still video games that try to do something different and experiment with storytelling, but I can’t imagine anyone with a decent background in art and literature being blown away by this mediocre theatre script dressed up as a point and click. It would have been much more convincing as an art piece if the developers actually cared to work on the presentation. What’s the point of developing a game if 80% of the events are only described by walls of text without any visual support? The eerie atmosphere and surreal visions along the way are truly captivating, but unfortunately, constitute a very small portion of the game.

Kentucky Route Zero is in one way a collection of stories intertwined between ghostly caricatures of the past, complicated stressed and living individuals, and government and environmental factors that work in such mysterious and incomprehensible ways to the denizens living underneath and on it that they might as well be supernatural, and which they are shown as within the entire work.
Every Act has interesting messages to tell, and lives to reflect on and shed a tear with. By the time everyone comes together to mourn the end of the journey, each person is fleshed out further than the featureless faces that adorn them would suggest. The game touches on several aspects of a decaying shifting void that is midwest America, whether that be the brainwashing ghastly denizens of corporations that push people into the neverending spiral debt hole they craft, or the old denizens on the high mountain scattered long after their nature project failed with an attachment to a dingy computer program that sounds constant static. There isn't really a single piece in here that feels without purpose or really in the wrong space at all. It is dense, certainly a less explicit piece than most, and a large amount of factors that make up the whole are something that it intentionally encourages you to research on your own. Each dialogue in their own points to several meta and thematic factors that don't just have to do with the characters at the receiving end of each line.
The visuals and music are just as thematically placed, each a perfect painting and screenshot in of itself. A lot of work was put into matching the perspective of the characters and where the camera is placed. A few specific examples that stand out to me is the revolving passage of time in Act 5, as a cat hearing everyone mourn and discuss where they're going, or the overbearing perspective when you move about the Hard Times. Or my favorite part, The Entertainment, as you bounce between each painfully depressing line.
I won't claim to understand all of what I saw as I played through the game, and honestly there are a lot of things that are too subtle for me to catch on, or maybe I'm just not in tuned enough to just get it. But that's fine. It's still a masterpiece of the medium, something I wish to see considered in high regard for the recognizable future. I hope it inspires people as much as it teaches me on aspects of life I've never been a part of or could directly relate to. It's a perfect encapsulation of what it sets out, and I was very emotionally invested. I highly recommend getting Kentucky Route Zero.